Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews. Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers. Turning to philosophy, literature, and the history of technology, and drawing on transnational cultural and diaspora studies, Presner charts the influence of increased mobility on interactions between Germans and Jews. He considers such major figures as Kafka, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Sebald, Hegel, and Heine, reading poetry next to philosophy, architecture next to literature, and railway maps next to cultural history. Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity.

The ubiquitous railway as a symbol of the tensions of Indian modernity.

The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

Moving Places draws together contributions from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exploring practices and experiences of movement, non-movement, and place-making. The book centers on “moving places”: places with locations that are not fixed but relative. Locations appearing to be reasonably stable, such as home and homeland, are in fact always subject to practices, imaginaries, and politics of movement. Bringing together original ethnographic contributions with a clear theoretical focus, this volume spans the fields of anthropology, human geography, migration, and border studies, and serves as teaching material in related programs.

A state-of-the-art reference on educational ethnography edited by leading journal editors This book brings an international group of writers together to offer an authoritative state-of-the-art review of, and critical reflection on, educational ethnography as it is being theorized and practiced today—from rural and remote settings to virtual and visual posts. It provides a definitive reference point and academic resource for those wishing to learn more about ethnographic research in education and the ways in which it might inform their research as well as their practice. Engaging in equal measure with the history of ethnography, its current state-of play as well as its prospects, The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education covers a range of traditional and contemporary subjects—foundational aims and principles; what constitutes ‘good’ ethnographic practice; the role of theory; global and multi-sited ethnographic methods in education research; ethnography’s many forms (visual, virtual, auto-, and online); networked ethnography and internet resources; and virtual and place-based ethnographic fieldwork. Makes a return to fundamental principles of ethnographic inquiry, and describes and analyzes the many modalities of ethnography existing today Edited by highly-regarded authorities of the subject with contributions from well-known experts in ethnography Reviews both classic ideas in the ethnography of education, such as “grounded theory”, “triangulation”, and “thick description” along with new developments and challenges An ideal source for scholars in libraries as well as researchers out in the field The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education is a definitive reference that is indispensable for anyone involved in educational ethnography and questions of methodology.

The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on what transpired elsewhere. The authors explore the history of Jewish modernization in Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Holland, France, England, Italy, and the United States. Topics covered include: the political and social authority of Jewish community institutions; external impediments and internal inhibitions for Jews to be absorbed by the dominant culture; the relationship of the state to the Jewish community; educational and religious reform; the influence of the rational scientific worldview; and the possibility of inclusion in the emerging middle classes.Contents: Jacob Katz, Introduction; Emanuel Etkes, Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskala Movement in Russia; Israel Bartal, 'The Heavenly City of Germany' and Absolutism a la Mode D'Autriche: The Rise of the Haskala in Galicia; Robert S. Wistrich, The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multiethnic State; Hillel J. Kieval, Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague, 1780-1830; Michael Silber, The German Jewish Experience and Its Impact on Hungarian Jewry, 1780-1870; Michael Graetz, The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century; Joseph Michman, The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry; Lois C. Dubin, Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah; Todd M. Endelman, The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England; Michael A. Meyer, German Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century America.

Glimpsing Modernity is a collection of papers presented at the US Army Medical Museum-sponsored conference on medical aspects of the First World War held in San Antonio, Texas, in February 2012. It captures the metamorphosis of military medicine during the war in a series of inter-related vignettes. Some of these stories provide new and insightful interpretations of known military medical themes, while others depart from these to examine less well-known, but truly important medical topics.

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities. Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey. Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and accommodate the various nomadic groups in the region. In the early years of the empire, maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in frontier regions, was an important source of strength. Cooperation between the imperial center and tribal leaders provided the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire, while allowing tribal leaders to perpetuate their own authority and guarantee the tribes' survival as bearers of distinct cultures and identities. This relationship changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as indigenous communities discovered new possibilities for expanding their own economic and political power by pursuing local, regional, and even global opportunities, independent of the Ottoman center. The loose, flexible relationship between the Ottoman center and migrant communities became a liability under these changing conditions, and the Ottoman state took its first steps toward settling tribes and controlling migrations. Finally, in the early twentieth century, mobility took another form entirely as ethnicity-based notions of nationality led to forced migrations.

From best-selling author David Morley, this book presents a set of interlinked essays which discuss and examine some of the key debates in the fields of media and cultural studies. Spanning the last decade, this fascinating and readable book is based on interdisciplinary work on the interface of media and cultural studies, cultural geography and anthropology. Clearly structured in five thematic sections, the book surveys the potential contribution of art-based discourses to the field and offers critical perspectives on the emergence of the ‘new media’ of our age. Including discussion on the status and future of media and cultural studies as disciplines, the significance of technology and new media, and raising questions about the place of the magical in the newly emerging forms of techno-modernity in which we live today, this is a media student must-read.